There are a few truths in life, things that can never be changed. From infallible properties of nature that, when left alone and not prodded by people with powers they probably shouldn’t have, are constant and reliable, to the nature of those very madmen with their mystical sticks and their gluttony for more power, more influence, and more life. One such rule that I’ve found, is that everybody you can ever meet has a day that they can look back on, and in no uncertain terms, call the worst day of their life. Some are truly horrible, terrible affairs, and others may be nothing worse than a pulled muscle or broken arm. This is the story about how my own, personal ‘worst day’ changed everything else in my life.

It was Monday, March thirteenth, and I had just woken up for work sometime earlier in the morning. I was a new transfer to the Standard Magitech Coalition’s newest outpost for the Department of Higher Energies, spending a couple of days acclimating to the ins and outs of station life and my own subordinates. Being the youngest appointed head researcher to any new outpost certainly sounds exciting, I can assure you that, on a good day, it shouldn’t be. I was a bundle of emotions, a bundle of very human, very normal emotions. After all, I was twenty-three years old and so eager to move up the ranks, to make a name for myself as someone who changed the course of energetic research, someone who tapped into the source of the energies itself. Sylvain Henry Camille Johansson, the man who brought humanity into a new, true, golden age. I would be lauded, a hero to the masses of empties, should I find a way to take what should have been everyone’s birthright, by force if necessary, and give it to us.

Of course, I realized how naïve that fantasy was, how everything would stand in my way, and how I was years from ever reaching a position where I could even try to spearhead an endeavor like that. Still, I wanted it, and I was going to get there, no matter what it took. That was why I’d been in the labs for over six hours, checking over the delicate work of dozens of different tinkers, not that I’d ever be able to pick out something wrong in the design in the first place. No, my presence this morning was a mix of formalities, of the inability to wait, and of showing myself to my new subordinates, trying to show that I am, in fact, competent enough to lead a station at the very edge of the Sol System, as far away from any other souls as we could possibly be.

Things were going well, too. While I had no idea how half this station worked, I knew very, very well what it was supposed to do when it worked. How we were going to use mana and psionics, qi and prana, four facets of raw power in a way that was only theoretically possible up until then to punch a hole into somewhere else. Granted, we weren’t quite sure where we’d be peeking into, but we, or rather I, had come up with a supposed proof saying that it’d only be a window, how there wouldn’t even be anything alive on the other side, just another realm of raw energy, or chaos, or nothing, or anything else. All we knew is that whatever would be on the other side was supposed to be uniform, whether in structure or composition, lacking in anything that could even think to retaliate. My superiors were already calling it Warp Space, I had no idea why beyond some nostalgic hope that what we would see on the other side would resemble science fiction of old. We knew it wasn’t the Hells, or the Abyss or Outer Realms that tended to drive anyone looking in absolutely mad, and that, I thought, was good enough.

We were wrong, I was wrong. I didn’t realize it until I had settled into my chair, surrounded by a nest of wires and screens and counters and detectors, surrounded by a crew of dozens of people arguably far more deserving of this post than I, were it not for a bit of healthy nepotism, each with their own chaotic setups. We had no idea what exactly we were looking for, other than some sort of theorized higher-order energy on par with mana, qi, psionics, you name it. We even hoped that it might be a step up from those volatile, overly touchy energies. We just had no idea how to detect it, hence the setup.

Which is why, when we hit a button, very many buttons in fact, and the batteries, the crystals, every inch of power in the main room, still dozens of kilometers away and separated by the vastness of space emptied in a single, hateful moment, we were surprised. When our own magitech suddenly went dark, we were scared. And when anyone with even the slightest wisp of mana or qi or psionics simply dropped to the floor, withered and very visibly not alive, we were scared.

The few remaining of us were, anyway. Empties, those ‘cursed’ few of us born without any potential in becoming something greater, without any energy beyond what our own cells churn out, were dreadfully rare, another reason why my post was so controversial. At that moment, I was thankful for my curse, as I’m sure the other seven empties, the other seven survivors, were doing too.

Unfortunately, it was not to last. We soon realized we were in an unpowered station, far from any other civilization, and perhaps most terrifyingly, only dozens of kilometers from another station holding something, a something that managed to rip the power and the life out of dozens of lives and a truly staggeringly expensive station designed to prevent exactly this. When we looked out of the outpost’s windows and saw that station, any thanks we had for our curse-turned-blessing was once more lost.

We saw it. I saw it. We had punched a hole into somewhere else, a stunning success there, and then that somewhere else had punched back, if the shredded, warped, transmuting debris our state-of-the-art research station had been reduced to was any indication. I saw the metal and the plastic breaking down and growing, boiling away into ethereal flowers and watery shapes, melting into impossible colors and being pulled to a singular point. I saw that point look at us with its faceless shapes, studying and dismissing and uncaring that I saw it. I felt it, I felt the rage and despair of an unliving mass of energy, or matter, being ripped apart from its home and forced to exist.

When that impossibly large point finally ran out of debris to twist and chew out of existence, it only got worse. Something about it became frantic, hungry, desperate. And that desperation fell onto me, was forced into me. I wish I could lie and say that there was more I had done, that after this thing of many things looked at me I turned away, resisted its siren song of profane truths with willpower even as my crewmates fell victim, but I can’t. I can’t tell you much of anything about what happened next.

I just remember being forced to look into the starving maw of The Everything, this place where there is no such thing as absence, where creation is absolute and total, the contradictions meant nothing because everything was constant. I can just as easily remember having Everything forced back into me, and then I realized I was always a part of it, a single piece in the totality of everything. For a single terrible instant, I was there. I wasn’t just looking through the open window into this plane of creation where everything that could possibly be was, had been, and would always be; I was torn through and made a beautiful part of all of it, from its perfect order to its endless chaos.

And then I wasn’t anymore. I was me again, I was more, so much more now, sure, but I was less, too. I was also alone, on my back, in a lab-made of pastel green wood with crude imitations of equipment made out of, to nobody’s surprise, everything. And then, I remembered that nightmarish heaven all over again, the same scene forced into my mind and branded onto my soul with dozens, thousands of iterations. I would go on, but from there even words and ideas strung together fail to do this experience any justice. What I can say is that on that day I was made into many things, and conscious was no longer one of them.

~~~

It was a long while before I finally did wake up, and I spent the first few minutes of my renewed consciousness performing some cathartic thrashing and screaming, trying to force every single memory of that day out of my head with the power of my lungs alone. Of course, it didn’t work, not at all. Instead, it only made things worse, like the very act of thinking of my “enlightenment” gave it power and trying to scorn it only spurred my own mind to attack me.

In fewer words, after screaming and convulsing, I spent the next twenty minutes hysterically sobbing and cradling my head, if trying to squeeze my head like a watermelon in a vice grip counts as cradling, because my head was being sheared in half and my brain was trying to escape back to that perfect, incomprehensible place, or maybe just smear itself across the walls. Honestly, though, I remember none of this except the pain from thoughts that were too big to fit into my head and too angry to come from my own neurons.

After blacking out and waking up only to do this all over again, repeatedly, I finally got to a point where I can start telling my own story again, instead of needing to look at a med station’s logs just to be able to tell that I was very nearly written off as a lost cause. I woke up once more, and my mind still felt like it was being very aggressively cooked, but I could choke back the screams. Instead, with a headache to end all headaches, a throat like steel wool, lungs that felt like empty balloons and a laundry list of other problems, I looked around. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to, but I realized that I wasn’t in that pastel green room I first woke up in, or in that freezer I had also remembered waking up in, or even in the dozens of different forms and flavors of hospital bedrooms I remember finding myself in.

Upon further inspection, I even found that this room made sense. There were no odd inconsistencies, there were no impossible hidden walls all over the place, no trophies of fish or anything that didn’t belong. I was cautiously optimistic, and oddly enough, even more hopeful when I found myself restrained to the bed I woke up in. Every iteration of my memory of that hellish wakeup was always the same, I could move, explore, wander around the mind-rending rooms until I found a window that could not be and stared into The Everything one final time before that window slammed shut.

Maybe it was done taunting me, maybe whatever slumbering thing we had woken up finally decided to stop toying with me and forcing more and more of me into myself, and I could finally return to some resemblance of sense. I had already spent a few hours planning on how to find the nearest psion, before having them rip out this memory from my head and maybe a couple of extra months around it just to be safe, when I heard a knock at the door I hadn’t cared enough to look at.

“ye-” I croaked, the sound barely escaping my lips before my throat decided to go on strike. I tried again, to tell whoever it was to come in, but my words refused to form. Thankfully, whoever it was wasn’t too concerned with manners at the moment, and the door slid open, revealing a nurse, a woman a little younger than I dressed in the traditional scrubs.

Apparently, she wasn’t ready for me to be staring at her so intently, and she’d already seemed a little nervous before she made eye contact with me. I’m not totally sure how I looked at that moment, but I could safely guess that I was more than a little feral when I looked at her because she took a soft gasp before clearing her throat.

“Oh, um, hello Mister Johansson” she began, not seeing me cringe at hearing the family name I felt barely qualified to retain, “I didn’t realize you were awake again.” She took a tentative step inside the room, before speaking again.

“You are awake, right?” I nodded weakly, and regretted it immediately, even the small movement felt like I’d had my brain thrown into my skull by some sadistic Olympian. She did seem to notice me recoiling in pain from my own movement, the wrong answer when movement is even more pain than being awake, and rushed over to the side of the bed.

She spoke some words as she made it to my bedside, apparently casting some sort of healing spell, but I wasn’t nearly as focused on the words themselves as I was on their effect. Almost immediately, I felt the soothing warmth of a numb spell, and I was vaguely aware of her preparing a chemical painkiller, too. I wish that I could enjoy it more before warmth turned to fire and soothing turned into arctic numbness, but my wishes were just words and hope, not magic. Not yet, anyway.

Then I felt the next wave of bottled peace wash over me, apparently that painkiller worked fast, and once more the riot in my mind became merely an angry protest. It would’ve been bliss were it not for the nurse speaking at me, the words keeping me from slipping into the mindless calm I needed.

“Mister Johansson, I’m going to go get a doctor and a healer, I know you have many questions and they’ll be answered, but for now you just have to stay awake. Can you do that for me, please?” She spoke softly, words lacking in confidence. She was likely either very new or very disturbed by whatever it was that had happened to me, or maybe both?

I couldn’t help but start to think more about everything. Not about The Everything, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t ever be able to think about that, but about what led up to us apparently waking it up, and about just how wrong everything had gone thanks to that… place, that nothing was ever not? That was about when I came up with that name too, ‘The Everything.’ With thoughts moving through my head like curdled milk, I had no better way of describing what I saw on the other side of that hole, no other name that I could give to some layer of reality that was simply… everything.

Even when that headache finally calmed into merely a constant pounding and not the mind-breaking agony it had been when I woke up, and when I could finally really start to think, I had no other name to give. That beauty and terror of seeing something that should not be is hardly unheard of, some of the most fascinating research has come from those who’ve been touched by something in the Outer Realms or looked too long into the Abyss, or any number of other things, but they were always described the same, always the same incoherent ramblings that described one sort of impossibility for each. This, though, I’d seen all of it and been all of it, I’d seen myself and everyone else, things that were real and couldn’t be real, because in The Everything, everything is not just possible but mandatory, and it was all of it at the same time.

I needed to find a way to not get put in an asylum, I realized, with some detached humor. That’s what happens to us when we see things that we can’t, we break, we change. Probably for the best, too, since just about anything at all can happen after a dive into the impossible and everyone gets their own unique ‘gifts.’ I couldn’t help but wonder what my own consolation prize would end up being. How would… whatever it was, see fit to reward this empty stain on the family’s name?

I winced with the thought, the frustration pushing just the right buttons to drive another spike right into the base of my skull. Hopefully my takeaway wasn’t that, I didn’t want to be Sylvain, the hegemon of headaches. Thankfully, though, that pain had been ebbing steadily away as I woke up, my racing thoughts both agitating the pain but also clearing it up, for whatever reason, and the impossible memories were also slowly being… tended to?

Is that why everything was hurting less? Every single contradictory memory scattered throughout my brain was getting steadily more coherent, not in any way I can put a word to, but something was taking the edge off, making each thought separate instead of trying to cram multiple lifetimes spent stuck in a single derelict room for a day into a single thought. That was true bliss.

“Sylvain? Sylvain. Are you there?” Ah, the doctor, right. I assumed he was the doctor, anyway, healers are too pompous to talk to their patients.

“-hah?” was my so very eloquent response, as I pushed the half-word out of my desert-dry throat.

“Very good, I’m Doctor Strenns, here at the Coalitions’ behest.” Ah, so they’d already shipped me to what I assume is some sort of specialist, so I’d probably already gotten a psion’s care, too. And it didn’t help. Damn. Still, I kept looking at him, waiting for him to continue since I had no intention of speaking any further.

“Anyways” he drew that out, apparently peeved that I wasn’t asking questions already, “I was informed about a very unusual patient, the only survivor of some failed experiment or another, found in peculiar circumstances that were not shared with me. In fact, I didn’t get anything more than you were soaked in some sort of higher energy, and presented symptoms of an Eldritch Enlightenment, and not a small one, either.” I nodded along, the doctor’s surprisingly mellow voice laced with a bit of confusion, interest, and frustration.

“Unfortunately, nothing we tried actually helped in any way, it’s been nearly a week since you were brought in, and all of us were starting to wonder if you’d ever truly wake up. Whatever it is you were doing was apparently very unwise.” I gave a weak glare at the man’s implied insult to my work, letting him finish.

“Now that you’re awake, though, maybe we can get some idea of what it is that went wrong and see what more we can do to help.” I nodded once more, starting to grow worried about what they’d tried while I was out and why it didn’t help, I had a hard time believing they’d just ignore me for a week and not try anything.

“Before that, let’s get you cleaned up. Maybe some food and water in you? Most of our healers have been reluctant to try treating you after-” He took a sharp breath and coughed, trying to cover up whatever it was he’d been about to say. This was less than good. “They’d been afraid that trying anything might only make things worse, so we stuck to healing your superficial injuries. We wouldn’t want inexperience to damage the mind of such a young prodigy, would we?” Sudden, unprompted compliments now, something really was wrong. Them saying they were treating superficial injuries while I was very clearly covered in bruises and cuts, and probably a bunch of other things I couldn’t pick out over the body-wide pain was also suspicious.

The slight tremble in the man’s voice that I noticed now that I was paying attention was suspicious. While I continued picking out more and more inconsistencies, ignoring the little voice in my mind that was telling me to… I’m not really sure what my own rebellious mind wanted at that moment, there were a lot of mixed messages. Still, since I was stuck in my room, oddly less upset about being restrained that I felt I should have been, all I could really do was brood, watching as I was brought food and water and my cuffs given just enough leeway to bring things to my mouth while the frightened nurse scurried away.

I took my time, forcing my shaky hands to obey as I finished every crumb and every drop and realized with some dismay that everything hurt just about as much as it did before, but now I had the added bonus of being horrifically nauseous and still starving. The good doctor came back, though, so at least I had a way to ignore my pressing need to turn inside out.

“Now then, Sylvain, are you feeling any better?” He asked, voice smooth and rich, but also a little worried.

“Yea, I am” I replied, hurting slightly less at saying words, but I still needed to make sure that words were all that came out of my mouth.

“You sound at least a little better, then, that’s good. I’ll have you brought some more water, though, to help with your throat. Now, I suppose you deserve to hear a little more about your circumstances.” I listened, ignoring the building pressure and slow droning whine of something in my ears.

“I can’t say much about how and where you were found, supposedly you were in an emergency pod, a few hours after your employers lost contact with your vessel, adrift and incoherent. No statement was given, but there was no wreckage I’ve been made aware of and no other survivors. Take this however you may.” That already didn’t add up.

“You were given emergency treatment, and apparently needed to be subdued. You were brought back to Earth after that, and I was consulted to treat you since qualified psychiatrists familiar with extranormal mental traumas are in short supply.” He sounded haughty when he said that but quickly slipped back into professionalism.

“Until today, nothing had changed, you weren’t responsive to any outside stimulus, and weren’t answering any questions. Actually, you weren’t speaking at all, which is unusual for patients who have been, let us say, enlightened.” Not too surprising, I somehow doubt that someone else has looked into the Everything, although I can’t tell where this confidence is coming from.

“And the uncontrolled esoteric discharges you’ve been causing have made more extensive treatment a bit unnerving, as a prospect.” Wait. Wait. That was not what I was expecting, uncontrolled esoteric discharge is doctor-speak for Wild Magic, usually, but always for some form of uncontrolled higher energy manipulation.

I’m an empty, though? I have never had a drop of anything, much less enough to make professionals trained in dealing with exactly this scared. No empty has, they just couldn’t. I was about to voice this but then realized his reaction, or lack of it, meant he didn’t know I was an empty.

Someone’s covering for me. If he doesn’t know, then someone more important than him does. The realization hit me like a brick, and I do mean that literally, a sharp pain directly behind the eyes was all I felt before I doubled over and finally lost the game of tug-of-war with my stomach. Thankfully, I wasn’t facing the good doctor when I did, because what came out of me was absolutely not what I had eaten minutes earlier.

Well, not unless what I’d eaten was a bunch of long, ropy lengths of vine and a handful of steel bearings, but I would remember such a meal. I hope I would. I was too racked with pain to pay much attention, though, even as the taste of bile and half-digested stuff that probably wasn’t food coated the inside of my mouth. I vaguely heard the doctor call for a healer, and maybe also a cleaner? But not much more before the keening wail behind my ears turned deafening, and then in some twisted joke, boiled out a word that left my mind frothing.

“Thank.”